Eight Days in New Hampshire

Bernie Sanders campaigns in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s upcoming Presidential primaries.

Photograph by Andrew Burton / Getty

We are entering “the greatest eight days in politics,” Marco Rubio said last night, as he and the other candidates, and their families and retinues, arrived in New Hampshire ahead of next Tuesday’s primary. The mood was hopeful and urgent: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s difficulties in Iowa have opened up the field. Five candidates can plausibly imagine themselves taking the oath of office. “Left hand on the Bible, right hand in the air,” Rubio told his supporters, pantomiming the scene, inviting them to imagine it. Ted Cruz went further, specifying the very Bible verse that his finger would rest on: 2 Chronicles 7:14. The same one, of course, as Ronald Reagan.

The preoccupation in New Hampshire, so far, is with youth. In the Republican contest, the young candidates, Cruz and Rubio, came out of Iowa on the rise; on the Democratic side, where both of the contestants are of retirement age, the energy belongs to Bernie Sanders, who attracts overwhelming majorities among young voters. Sanders gave his first speech of the New Hampshire phase of the campaign at 5 A.M. yesterday morning, standing on a flatbed truck. By mid-afternoon, at the Colonial Theatre in Keene, it seemed he would not rest until he had elicited from every citizen of the Granite State the details of their student-debt load. “A hundred and eighty-three thousand dollars,” he said, pinpointing the highest debt total in the crowd. “I feel like a Vermont auctioneer.” Sanders said that he has been attacked frequently for refusing to specify where the money for his programs—single-payer health care, tuition-free college—would come from, but that all of the critics have ignored his plan, which is to tax “Wall Street speculation.” (That last word received what was, even by his standards, an exceptionally phlegmy pronunciation.) Then Sanders stepped back, stone-faced, from the podium, blinked behind his glasses, and waited for the adulation, which came.

Standing isolated, with a stern and warlike look, while thousands roar—this has usually been Donald Trump’s pose. But, yesterday, Iowa not having gone how he would have liked, the billionaire turned gratefully to a new endorser: Scott Brown, the young, moderate former Republican Senator from Massachusetts, who is playing the role here that Sarah Palin did in Iowa. Is a pivot to the center coming? It’s hard to say. But Trump, whose voters in Iowa were older and closer to the social fringe, seemed pleased to bask in Brown’s reflected image. “Look at him,” Trump said, admiring Brown, who in his younger years posed shirtless for Cosmopolitan. “Central casting.”

New Hampshire looked beautiful yesterday—central casting, too. It was windless and warm, and if the candidates lifted their gaze as they careened across the state, they would have noticed the majesty of a mountainous place that has been possessed and preserved for centuries by a prosperous and finicky people. Lakes as big as towns were frozen clear across, the wooded slopes around them unoccupied. Lawn signs filled each town, all of them the same size except for Trump’s, which were bigger. Political journalists love to talk about New Hampshire’s “quirk,” but what they mean is that the seduction of the place is a trap, particularly for Republicans. The sparse settlements mean that the state doesn’t contribute much of a constituency to what is, elsewhere, the main body of conservatism, fixedly middle-class and religious. There is the stringent libertarianism of the hills and the rich comfort of the coast. Republicans, arriving here, must bend their campaigns to one or the other. Choose wisely.

Lunchtime: A Ted Cruz rally in the back room of a Wyndham church, the candidate in a tucked denim shirt and jeans (that is to say, a Canadian tuxedo). Cruz works in a very narrow range—he is either a crusader for the religious right in the culture wars or a crusader for the libertarian right in the anti-government wars—but he knows all of its dimensions. Yesterday, adapting to the place, he emphasized the libertarianism. The video that greeted the crowd was a loop of members of the Liberty Movement in Iowa, many of them veterans of the Ron Paul Presidential campaign, explaining why they chose Cruz. The candidate’s wife, Heidi, who is a partner at Goldman Sachs in Houston, explained that though her husband is a pastor’s son, he was “reared on the Constitution” at least as much as on the Bible. This was part of a description of the three reasons that she fell in love with him.

Cruz has, for months, wound his stump speech around an analogy between the present campaign and Reagan’s 1980 campaign, but yesterday, perhaps emboldened by his Iowa victory, he escalated the comparison. His victory in Iowa reunited the Reagan coalition, Cruz said, reminding listeners that, in 1980, voters in Iowa and New Hampshire defied the insiders and selected the insurgent, elevating Reagan to the lead in the primary. That vote, Cruz intoned, changed the course of human history, “not just America’s but the world’s,” liberating “billions from bondage.” But there were reminders every few minutes that Cruz was not the only claimant to Reagan’s legacy. A woman in the crowd asked the Texan to dispel the “clouds of whatever” that Marco Rubio had summoned by arguing that Cruz was no purer on immigration than he. Cruz pointed out that while Rubio worked for comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, Cruz fought against it. He advised the crowd to judge the candidates by their actions, not their words, and cited scripture: “You shall know them by their fruits.” There was some exasperation among Cruz’s supporters that the media seemed so keen to treat Rubio, who finished third in Iowa, as though he had won. A Cruz supporter turned to a reporter in the crowd: “Who won Iowa, the man who finished first or the man who finished third?”

At dinnertime, that third-place man bounded into the Exeter Town Hall, where the chairs had been cleared out so that everyone in the room was standing. Rubio, a short man, stood on a riser and introduced his wife and four children. Behind him were more children still, his supporters’ kids—youth surrounded him. Someone kept calling out, “We love you, Marco!” It might have been some strategically minded staffer, but it succeeded in upping the energy in the room. Rubio himself seemed both delighted and thrown by the enthusiasm. He kept stumbling over his stump speech, which he normally executes with the practiced certainty of an eye surgeon. At one point, digressing, he explained that, as a child, he had not hated the game Marco Polo. Then he tried to regroup. “Where was I?” he wondered, aloud. Then he remembered. “The economy.”

In his brief career, Rubio has been an ideologically variable figure, so the suspicion has been that his harder conservatism and the explicit religious talk he used in Iowa would subside in New Hampshire, and that he would move to occupy the so-called “moderate lane.” Rubio’s crowd last night was filled with the kind of people who send their assistants to wait in line for new Apple products, but he did not move far toward them. When talking about ISIS, he was dark and stormy. The country, he warned, was on the edge of a cliff, looking down. He summoned the populism that Trump has come to symbolize: “You have the right to be angry,” he told his crowd.

What infuriates movement types about Rubio is their conviction that he is conservative only when it suits him. What agitates liberals is their certainty that the press allows Rubio’s moving personal story and references to the American dream to obscure the forthright conservatism of his policies. Whatever the human truth might be, a political truth was apparent last night: Rubio is running as a conservative. His speech was short—half an hour—he took no questions, and left to ringing applause. In the emptying hall, where Abraham Lincoln once gave a speech, a question stood out: Were Rubio and Trump, like tectonic plates, aiming to slip past each other, the billionaire headed toward the center and the young Floridian toward the right? Stranger things have happened in New Hampshire. It is a quirky place.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.